472 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



then practised at Lyons, and later taught at Paris, where he attracted 

 great numbers of students by his fame as a teacher and an operator. He 

 completed his " Chirurgia Magna" in 1296. Ten years later he died, 

 but meanwhile he had transferred the center of the surgical world from 

 Italy to France. Lanfranc was probably the first surgeon to absolutely 

 distinguish between nerve and tendon, and he was the first to advocate 

 and practise nerve suture. 



Henry de Mondeville, or Henricus, was a Norman, little known 

 until modern times. The first printed edition of his book was edited 

 by Professor Pagel, in Berlin, in 1892. Mondeville was a scholar and a 

 traveler. Born in France, he studied under Theodoric in Italy, and 

 later at Montpellier and Paris. He afterwards lectured in both of these 

 universities. He was a very busy man — a teacher, a consultant and one 

 of the physicians to King Philip le Bel. We see in him the not un- 

 familiar picture of the famous surgeon trying to make time for his 

 writing. He died before he was forty of some lung disease — probably 

 tuberculosis. He sketched the earlier chapters of his work on his sick 

 bed, but wrote the practical portion at length in the last chapter so 

 that his students might profit by his experience. He was a shining 

 example of the wide culture and erudition of the university-trained 

 surgeon of his day, quoting, as he did, not only from the Latin, Greek 

 and Arabian authorities on medicine, but also from Cato, Diogenes, 

 Horace, Ovid, Plato, Seneca and other classics not popularly known 

 until the Renaissance. Mondeville used a large magnet to extract por- 

 tions of iron from tissues, and invented an instrument for extracting 

 barbed arrows from the flesh. He wrote intelligently on the nursing 

 problem, and spoke of the difficulties to the surgeon when wives nursed 

 their husbands. A chapter on the history of surgery is a novel feature 

 of his book. He was one of the first, if not the very first, to use illus- 

 trations in teaching anatomy. 



Yperman, who was sent by the town of his name in Belgium to 

 Paris in order to learn surgery, fulfilled his mission, and returning to 

 his native town, practised and wrote two books on surgery in Flemish. 

 John Ardern, an Englishman, studied at Montpellier, and, returning to 

 England, practised and wrote on surgery. The " Practica " is a com- 

 prehensive work by this English surgeon, containing many case his- 

 tories. He was a skillful operator, especially famed as a proctologist, 

 and was the first surgeon to collect careful statistics of his eases. His 

 book is illustrated, and he writes on what we now recognize as appen- 

 dicitis under the title " Against Colic and the Iliac Passion." Ardern 

 was the first great English surgeon. 



We are inclined to deny to the middle ages anything approaching 

 our tolerance of thought in the domain of education. The idea of co- 

 education, and women in the learned professions, would seem to be 



